Due to our growth within developing markets, we have had to help waste collection companies with an innovative method to collect cash and cheque payments.  This new service called Mobile Trustee enables service providers to collect cash and cheque payments and to be seamlessly able to reconcile all transactions easily.

Mobile Trustee is deployed out into the field for door to door collectors or installed in shops and petrol stations.  Customers are asked for their customer number, certain personal details and amount they wish to pay – this transaction then gets processed into the Mobile Trustee server and a paper receipt is issued to the customer.

The administrator of the country specific Mobile Trustee can reconcile with shops and collectors easily and if required enable credit per account e.g. 30 days credit.  Then every 3rd day the Mobile Trustee will synchronize (over WSDL) all customer payments with the service provider – in this case it would be the waste collection company, but it could also be the local power company or loan provider.

The Mobile Trustee consists of the following components:

• Mobile Trustee Server & Control Panel
• Secure REST Server & WSDL Sync
• Android application

Once deployed within the country, the Mobile Trustee can easily handle:

• Administrators and system users
• Service Providers
• Shops & cash collection teams
• Payments

Currently we have the Mobile Trustee deployed in Ghana.  It has a network of 60 shops and collectors – these use the cheap Samsung Galaxy Y phone and a small bluetooth printer, with a simple GPRS sim card.

One of the main challenges facing waste collection companies around the world is the high level of non-recyclable waste being placed in the green bin and the high level of non-compostable waste being placed in the brown bin.  It is vitally important that the correct waste is placed in the correct bin.
If a recycling bin containing contaminated waste is emptied into a bin truck and, subsequently, brought to a recycling station, it can potentially contaminate an entire recycling load. This leads to inefficiencies in the sorting and recycling processes and, in certain cases, all of the waste will have to be landfilled.

The WIS system has come up with a very innovative and effect product built into our Bin Collector system that monitors contaminated bins and provides realtime information to the WIS control panel – where the system can be setup to penalize and educate the customer going forward.

Sunrise Innovations Ltd will be exhibiting our Waste Information Server at this years Waste Expo in New Orleans, USA on the 20th – 23rd May 2013.

At the event we will be doing live demonstrations of route management and automated UHF RFID bin cart reading.  So pop by for a detailed demo or why not book a private meeting.

Booth # 2565 near the technology pavilion – Locate our Booth at Waste Expo 2013

The WIS server can operate on any domestic or commercial service offering but many waste companies and municipalities around the world are looking more and more to pay as you throw to offer customer’s value for money.

In its natural sense pay as you throw is as it states “the customer pays for what they throw”, so if the service offering is €10 per waste collection of a 240 litre bin then each time the bin is emptied a €10 charge is added to the customer’s account.  Over the years of pay as you throw, waste companies have adapted the service plan and offered different variations of the plan.  The main additional of the service plan would be the adding of a low service charge on top of the pay as you throw charge.  This enables waste companies to cover the cost of collection and bins per customer.

Within WIS, customers can be setup with the pay as you throw service plan, their bins chipped with RFID tags and placed onto a collection route.  Once the bin collector scans the bin it automatically states if there is enough credit on the account to empty the bin.  If OK, he can empty it and the fee is debited to the customers account, if STOP, do not empty he leaves a plastic note on the bin to explain to the customer to topop their account.  This provides the waste company with the basic principle “Your account must be in credit to ensure collection”.

If a customer’s bin is stolen and used by another customer, it will state Unknown Customer to the bin collector which means the bin is out of its GPS range and do not empty.  They office staff can see unknown bins on the map and notify the bin manager to go out and fetch the bins, and solve the ticket.

The WIS pay as you throw service offering is most probably the cheapest system on the planet and is very easy to setup and operate. If you would like a demonstration please contact us directly.

With pay by empty and pay by weight in affect across Europe, customers are placing more and more illegal items into their recycling bin – so how do waste companies encourage customers to put to the right contents into the recycling bin.

According to most waste companies they feel the only way would be to record video / pictures at the lift arm and somehow allow the office staff to view pictures of wrongful material.  As you can imagine this would be very costly per each truck installation and expensive to maintain.  Also it would be very time consuming for office staff to sift through poor quality pictures.  So in essence it would not help solve the problem, instead probably causing further costs and waste staff time.

From our experience in the waste industry the only way to reduce wrong materials going into the recycling bin is to educate and charge:

•    Continuously educate and remind customers about what contents are allowed in the recycling bin.  We suggest sending internal house stickers which the family can place on internal bins and also on the external bins.   The more places the information is, the more ingrained it becomes into the householders.

•    Collectors have a quick contents check of each recycling bin and then a pull check to make sure it’s not too heavy.  If the collector thinks the bin contents are wrong they should NOT empty the bin and leave a note on the bin explaining their bin content are wrong.  The customer should then be allowed to place the recycling bin out the following week, which should be charged as per a waste collection.

One of the main causes of poor quality recyclables is in fact the process of pay by weight, in that customers pay more money for their waste weight and less or nothing for their recycling.  So customers try and sneak waste into the recycling bin to save a few euros.  So as the company tries to incentivize recycling in fact what they are doing is forcing low income householders to try their arm at hiding waste in their recycling bin.

Pay by weight even though perfect in theory, has very high start up costs and high running costs in maintaining the system and ensuring the load cells are calibrated correctly.  Also as mentioned above it increases the chance of customers placing waste into their recycling bin – even if little will contaminate the recycling contents.

So as a result the only and best way to increase the quality of recyclables it to operate a simple pay by empty service coupled together with an educate and charge policy – everything else will cost more and produce less of a result.